The American movie industry was largely the creation of diminutive Jewish immigrants or the sons of immigrants. But in the 1920s three tall, rich gentiles from affluent backgrounds were drawn to Hollywood through their interest in sex, power, money and glamour. They were the press tycoon William Randolph Hearst who was promoting the career of his mistress, Marion Davies; the banker Joseph P Kennedy, father of future president John F Kennedy, there to spectacularly increase his fortune and manage the affairs of his mistress, Gloria Swanson; and the youngest of them, the Texan Howard Hughes, who had spent delightful times in Hollywood as a child with his millionaire mining engineer father, and came back for more after he had inherited the family fortune at the age of 18.

All three are the subjects of numerous books, some fairly lurid, and Hearst's career inspired one of the greatest movies ever made, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, the working title for which was American. Hughes has been impersonated on screen at least five times, and American might well have been the title of Martin Scorsese's biographical epic The Aviator. The original screenplay is by John Logan, whose various scripts include one for RKO 281, a TV film about the making of Citizen Kane. At a mundane level the title refers to Hughes's fascination with flying (he designed the largest plane ever made and created records for speed and round-the-world flights). But it also suggests a hero in the tradition of the Wright Brothers and Charles Lindbergh, a legendary figure like Daedalus, Icarus or Bellerophon, and a man who soars above an earthbound common humanity.

The film begins with a brief epilogue during the 1913 Houston cholera epidemic with the impressionable eight-year-old Howard being told by his overprotective mother of the dreadful diseases around him. This was the beginning of a lifelong fear of germs and contamination that would eventually become a debilitating phobia. (This combined with his increasing deafness and paranoia was to make him an strange figure.) The picture then jumps forward 14 years to Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Hollywood, directing Hell's Angels . Three years in production, this self-financed flying movie would cost more than $3m and confound the big studio bosses by turning a sizeable profit at a time when the Wall Street Crash and the coming of sound had created a crisis in the movie business. The film combined his passions for aviation, risk-taking, sex (it featured his first famous discovery, Jean Harlow), scandalising orthodox tastes, and showing up his detractors.

These early scenes, like the rest of the movie, are a succession of magnificent set-pieces. One of the most memorable is a romantic flight over Los Angeles at night with Hughes handing over the controls to Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), the love of his life, as a swing band plays 'Moonglow' on the soundtrack. This first episode with Hepburn ends with a dissolve from his hand running down her naked back to him stroking the sleek silvery surface of his new plane. As Hughes remarks about designing aeroplanes and brassieres: 'It's all engineering.'

The film moves chronologically over a mere 20 years, covering his film-making, flying, designing, amorous pursuits, battles with enemies and employees. It concludes in 1947 with Hughes piloting the first (and only) flight of his mammoth flying boat, Hercules. Seemingly triumphant and still in his early forties, he's hovering on the brink of clinical insanity. This is a little like Young Winston , which ends just as Churchill is entering the House of Commons for the first time. Hughes was soon to create a major airline, acquire the RKO studio, buy up much of Las Vegas, and become a deranged recluse, though his fortunes grew and grew through his bizarre financial acumen and technological vision.

To have presented the movie in flashback as Hughes was dying in 1976 would have invited an obvious comparison with Citizen Kane, though in fact Welles borrowed this form, as Jorge Luis Borges was the first person to point out, from a 1933 film The Power and the Glory, no complete copy of which survives. The chronological method, however, results in a loss of complex ity, an ironing out of contradictions and the omission of some key moments, such as Hughes's strange TE Lawrence-like period as a pseudonymous airline pilot in the 1930s. As with most biopics, the central character becomes a hero surrounded by lesser folk. Hughes is turned, rightly or wrongly, into a Nietzschean superman of the kind extolled by Ayn Rand (especially in The Fountainhead), a visionary triumphing over inferior, jealous persons who stand in his way - people such as Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin), the president of Pan Am, the vindictive Senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) and Louis B Mayer, who stands in for all the envious moguls. Everything he does is justified, and to reinforce his moral isolation we're invited to share his disgust with the liberal, haut-bourgeois tastes and values of Katharine Hepburn's family circle, who are cruelly caricatured at a lunch party. This scene is presumably inspired by the snobbish reception given to Tracy Lord's self-made fiance in The Philadelphia Story. There is no reference to Hughes's anti-semitism or right-wing, near-fascist politics, while his cruelty, insensitivity and egotism are excused as the prerogative of genius.

There is also the biopic problem of actors playing real people. DiCaprio does well as Hughes the careless young charmer, and is particularly good as the older, physically damaged Hughes who makes a forceful impression before a senate committee in 1947. Blanchett, though something less than a dead ringer for Hepburn, recreates the fluting New England voice, the patrician manner, and the loping walk with uncanny accuracy. Kate Beckinsale doesn't get Ava Gardner at all, and Gwen Stefani is hopelessly miscast as Jean Harlow.

Despite the shortcomings as serious biography, The Aviator is an immensely enjoyable three hours and the American cinematographer Robert Richardson, the Italian production designer Dante Ferretti, the British costume designer Sandy Powell, and Scorsese's regular editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, have done exemplary work that will rightly bring them Oscar nominations.

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About this article

Film of the week

This article appeared on p9 of the Observer Review section of the Observer
on Saturday 25 December 2004.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 18.26 EST on Sunday 26 December 2004.
It was first published at 18.26 EST on Saturday 25 December 2004.